Kevin Barry is, as Roddy Doyle (author most famously of The Commitments) claims, “unique, a one-man school. His work is hilarious.” In Ireland, Kevin is both a popular and an award-winning author, of short stories, of novels, and most recently of a play, Autumn Royal. For the last three years, he and his partner Olivia Smith have edited an Irish arts anthology, Winter Papers, which has published and advocated for a new generation of Irish authors and artists, including, among others, Lisa McInerney. In the US, Kevin has published in The New Yorker, and has published novels such as The City of Bohane and Beatlebone. Kevin has been a Burns fellow at Boston College, where he described his role as having been their “resident Celt.”
It’s simplifying things, but we could say that there are two modern literary traditions in Ireland—one urbane mode focused on and derived from the country’s capital Dublin, and those who head to the Continent from it (e.g., Joyce, Behan, Beckett, and Doyle), and another rural, maritime one focused on the west coast, its islands, and transatlantic migrations (e.g., Michael O’Sullivan, Colum McGann, Richard Murphy, Joseph O’Connor, and Colm Toibin). The famous exceptions to this pairing are in explorations of the Irish-language stories and lives of the western isles. From Synge in the Aran Islands to Maurice O’Sullivan and Peig Sayers in the Blaskets, the west coast of Ireland offered an alternative, famously oblivious to Dublin; and in Dublin, Flann O’Brien, who also wrote as Myles na gCopaleen, engages this rural tradition, most famously in An Béal Bocht, translated into English as The Poor Mouth. While the urbane tradition of Joyce and Beckett expected readers to know Latin, French, Greek, English, sometimes Irish, and other languages as well, the works of the islanders are usually translated out of the Irish, and not always written by the story tellers themselves. In short, the island literature records an oral Irish-language culture.
Kevin’s work is connected to this westward movement. A 2010 story published in the New Yorker titled “Fjord of Killary” our narrator buys a ramshackle hotel in the west of Ireland, and as it happens is there as a lashing rain leads to a flood which lifts and floats the hotel away, while its drunken patrons continue to debate the finer points of a good coastal storm.
Subsequently, Kevin published The City of Bohane, which merges an Irish town with the generic expectations of an American western. Since The City of Bohane, Kevin has published a novel, Beatlebone, which takes as its inspiration the actual “trip”–a word I use advisedly—that John Lennon undertook to visit the island that he had purchased in Clew Bay, Co. Mayo, Ireland. The novel combines imagining Lennon’s experience upon arriving in rural western Ireland, his desperation to be alone on his island, and a first-person narrator who emerges late in the story talking about investigating this story, and the purported lost tape–the Beatlebone album–supposedly recorded by John Lennon after his return from the field trip to Clew Bay. With its focus on a west-coast island, its nearly-entire reliance on dialogue, and its claiming to offer a recording of the voice of John Lennon, Beatlebone is a twenty-first century entry into a century-long discovery of the oral traditions of rural, western islands Ireland. At the same time, the figure of John Lennon bridges both sides of the Irish emigration experience—born in Liverpool to Irish immigrants, Lennon visits his own island from the island on which he was then living, Manhattan, NYC, in the US, and thus transcends the Atlantic.
Born in Limerick, Kevin Barry lives in Sligo, County Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland, in a former police barracks, in the county seat of the very county that is at the center of Yeats country. And while he might say that he spent his teenage years haunting the cemeteries of his native Limerick (or haunting its libraries), Kevin has also lived in the US and has as a result seen Ireland from this side of the Atlantic, too.
Kevin will be reading at Clemson on February 19th at 5:30 in Daniel Hall room 100B.